This is where she belonged. Here—where she was surrounded by shifting sands, the whisperings of the ocean lapping against the shoreline, the crunch and crackle of kelp beneath her young hooves. There was an awful—awful in a good way—and comforting familiarity to the reek of salt, the keen of the gulls, the glittering lapis lazuli water. She couldn't explain it, not properly—couldn't explain the vast sense of belonging, the sensation of being reduced becoming just a biotic factor, a part of the tideline so wide and expansive, released from duty and expectation. In this sun-soaked shoreline, she was alone and small, insignificant, and she loved that. Without pressure, with no burden upon her shoulders, only sweet silence and the feel of the ocean spray kissing her shoulders, her hips, her cheeks... she may as well have been a bird on the cusp of the wind, or a fish flickering through the ocean currents cut loose from the tangled fisherman's nets.

The grullo moves idly, almost apathetically, sweltering under the relentless eye of the sun. Sweat dampens and curls her coat, giving her a glossy sheen of silver over her fore- and hindquarters; sand and grit clings to her dampened limbs, grains caught and snagged in each slight imperfection, the creases and crevices where muscle joins. Lungs move, disjointed in their spread and fold, their usefulness reduced by the thickness of the air, the reluctance with which the oxygen cycles through her bloodstream. Occasionally nausea surges—her gorge rises and she halts, breathing coming ragged, as the heat swells and pulsates beneath her charcoal veneer. You know; that... sickly feeling, where your skin warms and prepares to break into sweat, only for the heat to sink deeper into your bones, lurk and wait there; and then it expands outwards again, grotesque and feverish.

How painfully jealous she is—and painful being not hyperbole or exaggeration but reality—of her companion. Even in this sweltering, oppressive, and utterly damnably heat, he is happy, reveling in the warmth. Dragons. Sometimes, she just couldn't understand why Volterra even liked them. Perhaps it was only Lil, but they were... so arrogant, greedy and fiendish with an eye for the shiny things.

Nostrils quiver, flare, and cusp wide, eyelids slithering in a slow song across her ruby corneas. On she wanders, hooves sinking into the sand, the curves of her path a rhythm, a rhyme unspoken and unsaid, a harmony offset by the creak and rustle of her companion's wings.

Ahead a shape, cut from the seafoam and stitched with thread from the clouds, begins to materialize, shaping up from a faint, distant blur to hips and a sharp face and thick sinews. Cradled along a spine of snow were wings, oblong figures of chiseled ivory; even from the distance, she could imagine the feathers whispering in the breeze, crooning to the waves licking up against the pegasus' flanks. Hesitation makes her heart skip a beat, uncertainty making her step falter, and the filly slows, rambling into a lazy halt. Hooded eyes, tight-skinned with worry and wrinkled with thoughts, cast thoughtfully over the picturesque landscape, tracing the wide horizon line.

The worm of Lilómiel's thoughts wiggles, uncurls, serpentine, flexing through the unraveling threads of her mind. It probes along through the stitchings of her vague interest, the mild sense of worry, the hard edge of his amusement sharp like a knife against the curve of her throat. Teeth grit together, pearls cranking tightly close to feel the invasive touch of the black's intruding fingertips; go away, she beseeches him, and with a taunt and final prod, he withdraws.

Perhaps, if only to annoy him and his solitary ways, the daughter of Confutatis steps into the ocean.
Out she goes, to the woman in white awaiting companionship.

nymeria

what's a king to a god?